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You mean the one where you really didn't refute Dru's point? Yeah, I read that one.

There are plenty of good reasons to want to be able to do things that don't hurt or otherwise impact other people without other people finding out about them. That is what privacy is for.

But there's no way to ensure it's only used in that way, which is my point.

I'm not saying privacy is all bad, I'm saying on the balance it is bad.

Of course there's no way to ensure it's only used in that way! Welcome to the fucking planet! People are going to fucking lie to you. No matter what. No matter how many cameras you shove up everyone's ass, people will still fucking lie to you.

But you know what the difference is? Now you've got a camera up your ass.

Nah, I'm pretty sure that if we shove enough cameras far enough up enough asses, we can keep people from lying. And that's more important to me than not having a camera in my ass.

you can't just run at things with only your noggin. You have to account for more than just science

So you're suggesting that because certain people are illogical or an extreme minority in a way of thinking or a behavior that clearly goes against the grain, it is up to the rest of society to not only tolerate that, but support it. Just because it exists.

Are you a spokesman for NAMBLA by any chance?

no, he's saying that government policy shouldn't be determined by sheer statistics

first you suggest that anyone who is against the government taking over employment overview from the private market is a technophobe and now you compare somebody who says that statistics shouldn't make policy to a pedophile

so

yeah

So governments should be ran on tea leaves, astrological signs, and whims of crowd?

Yes, I do believe people who think that concept like statistics shouldn't be used to make policy are pedophiles. Stupid pedophiles who run their unicorn cars on dreams and fairy farts. I think people who are against thumb print cards for identification are more afraid of the unknown then the true potential of a government ran Machiavellian scheme.

I don't believe in that kind of shit (re: tea leaves etc.)

When governments make policy, they should not strictly use mathematical intelligence. It certainly helps, but emotional intelligence and foresight play a huge role as well.

It it naive to assume that decisions made based solely on numbers would fair well. People are more complex than a simple equation. And if science was able to boil down the human race into a predictable, malleable, bland race, then there would be no point in mankind sticking around.

who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with

I think people do not accurately estimate how little privacy, day-to-day, actually yields any kind of well-being.

As I said before, anything you gain from personal privacy cuts against you equally because other people are just as capable of using it against you.

You can use privacy to manipulate me into thinking something about you that isn't accurate but benefits you, and I can do the same thing.

It's a wash.

And on top of that, it requires lots of energy and effort to maintain, oftentimes causing psychological distress (lying to people can be hard to keep up, I think we all know) and feelings of shame or guilt.

Also, I'd venture that, at least on the issue of bigotry, privacy is counterproductive. We know, for example, that people who learn that they have a gay friend or family member become much more supportive of gay rights. Harvey Milk talked about this in the '70s when he pleaded with gay Americans to come out of the closet to move the struggle forward.

Acceptance rarely precedes interaction.

what about people that simply do not want to come out of the closet, for their own reasons whatever they may be

Nah, I'm pretty sure that if we shove enough cameras far enough up enough asses, we can keep people from lying. And that's more important to me than not having a camera in my ass.

How I read that.

Yes. That is pretty much what I said.

I mean you conveniently leave out the reasoning and examples that explain why I believe that, so your post is argumentatively meaningless, and doesn't engage any meat of the discussion, but you're not wrong, I guess. You're dodging the argument, but you're not wrong.

Nah, I'm pretty sure that if we shove enough cameras far enough up enough asses, we can keep people from lying. And that's more important to me than not having a camera in my ass.

How I read that.

Yes. That is pretty much what I said.

I mean you conveniently leave out the reasoning and examples that explain why I believe that, so your post is argumentatively meaningless, and doesn't engage any meat of the discussion, but you're not wrong, I guess. You're dodging the argument, but you're not wrong.

Here, I'll break it into smaller pieces.

Yes, shoving cameras up asses makes people lie less.

No, shoving cameras up asses, no matter how far, no matter how many, will never make people stop lying.

Shoving cameras up asses won't create a utopian society where no one ever deceives anyone else.

it was hunter and backwards name, though backwards made a case for subjectivity in relation to people's idea of privacy=safety while people forgot he conceded that the card was a dumb idea if they thought it would solve anything

while it may benefit gay rights overall, it should still be someone's choice to come out of the closet or not.

Well, I think this may be a fair point but I do want to put it out there that individual humans are really bad at predicting what will make us happy. Freedom of choice is not at all related to well-being, even subjectively defined. Look how many people pursue great wealth when all evidence suggests that once you're about middle class all additional wealth fails to correlate to any significant gain in well-being. Look at how Americans tend to rate themselves as less satisfied and less happy than many people in developing nations.

Honestly, I think there's really a paucity of evidence to suggest that our society is substantially better at producing well-being than most of our hunter-gatherer ancestral societies were. That doesn't mean we go back to that, because it wasn't any better back then either, but most studies of self-reported well-being seem to suggest that freedom of choice and wealth don't correlate to well-being as closely as we like to think.

Which means that someone's choice to stay in the closet may be motivated out of a limited scope of knowledge and experience that fails to accurately predict the results of their actions. I mean how many times do you hear people say how great they felt when they finally came out. It's more than a bit more common than the reverse. I mean have you seen San Francisco? It's basically heaven.

In general, I tend to think that an individual person is one of the worst predictors of what will make themselves happy. It makes sense, from an evolutionary standpoint. Our actions are largely motivated by emotion and desire, which are heavily genetically influenced (in the sense that guilt or love or euphoria or hopelessness is an evolved mechanism. All humans feel these emotions -- they're built into the brain). However, that doesn't mean they'll make us happy as individuals. After all, as we all know, the individual is not the unit of selection.

Essentially what I'm trying to say is that our actions (our choices) are generally better suited to preserve the genetic viability of the genes that influence those actions rather than to preserve the well-being of the individual organism. I mean, shit, look at misery. It's clearly evolutionarily useful, because it's universally present in our species and is an important way to motivate us to do stuff. Definitionally, though, it sucks. What is useful to our genes is rarely what is useful to us as people. They are not perfectly overlapping spheres of interest.

I think, on this note, that a lot of the ascetic religious groups of the world have basically figured this out. Buddhist monks, for example. You got the basic idea that desire is the root of all suffering, which is pretty much another way of saying what I just said from an evolutionary psychology perspective. They train themselves to live lives as uninfluenced as possible by their genetic interests, and more influenced by their interests as individual human beings to find happiness and well-being. I definitely dig on ascetics for this reason.

But, back to the point of privacy. I think it may even have a few good applications, but on the whole if we got rid of it in general, I think the good would more than balance out the bad effects.